UN: Syria war children ‘will grow up illiterate’

BEIRUT: Syria’s devastating civil war will force a generation of children to grow up illiterate and filled with hate, a UN envoy warned on Thursday as fighting raged on around the country.
Leila Zerrougui, the special representative for children and armed conflict, said both sides in the Syrian conflict, now in its third year, continue to commit grave violations against children.
Scores of children have been killed, injured, detained, and forced to witness or to commit atrocities as President Bashar Assad’s troops battle opposition fighters trying to oust his regime, she said.
Zerrougui spoke following a three-day visit to Syria, where she met with government officials and rebel commanders. She said she urged both sides to spare the children. Once the war is over, Zerrougui said she told her counterparts, they “will have to face a generation of children who lost their childhood, have a lot of hate and are illiterate.”
The fighting has destroyed thousands of schools across Syria while many of those still standing have been turned into shelters for displaced people, Zerrougui also said, speaking to reporters in Beirut.
Before Syria, the UN envoy also visited Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, including Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq.
She said children account for nearly half of the five million Syrians who fled their homes because of the fighting. Of those, half have not gone to school. And nearly 70 percent of those who do go to school drop out because they need to help support their families or for other reasons, Zerrougui added.
During her visit to Syria, Zerrougui also urged opposition forces to stop recruiting children into combat and asked the government to consider children, who were forced to taking up arms, as victims, not as combatants. Aid groups have warned that some 2 million children in Syria are facing malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma as a result of the civil war.
The Violations Documentation Center in Syria, a key activist group that keeps track of the war’s dead, wounded and missing persons, says 7,132 children under the age of 15 have been killed in the past two and half years, including 4,939 boys and 2,193 girls.
Fighting continued unabated in Syria on Thursday, particularly in the north, where activists said Kurdish fighters took control of a major town near the border with Turkey.
Meanwhile, Britain has abandoned plans to arm Syrian rebels fighting to overthrow Assad and believes he might survive in office for years, sources familiar with government thinking say.
In one of the gloomiest assessments of the conflict yet, the sources also told Reuters that a peace conference to try to end the conflict might not happen until next year if at all.
“Britain is clearly not going to arm the rebels in any way, shape or form,” said one source, pointing to a parliamentary motion passed last week urging prior consultation of lawmakers.
The reason for the shift was the largely hostile public opinion and fears that any weapons supplied could fall into the hands of radicals.
“It will train them, give them tactical advice and intelligence, teach them command and control. But public opinion, like it or not, is against intervention,” the source said.